MDN/Projects/Development/Hacks Localization

Project statement

Offer Mozilla Hacks in a number of different languages. Currently, almost one third of the visitors are from North America, and together, North America and Europe have about 72% of all the visitors. Meaning, the possibilities are endless when it comes to places like South America and Asia, where English knowledge isn't as strong.

By localizing Mozilla Hacks - and we have lots of communities interested in doing the actual translations - we'll be able to reach a much wider and more disperse audience. Offering a product in many languages has also been a key driving factor for Firefox, and has given us a lot of goodwill and following, and I see this as an extension to that.

Measuring the size of the opportunity and the impact of the project would easily be seen in more unique visitors to Mozilla Hacks overall, with the new addition stemming from more countries with more non-native English speakers.

It is also a great opportunity to foster and increase our localization community.

Implementation resources

Develop our own WordPress L10N plugin that would be secure and hopefully portable to other blogs. Previous investigation showed the available plugins to have security issues and were not approved by Security Assurance.

Build completely separate instances of a blog and host the localized template and content at a different URL. Not very elegant, but it works.

Have localized content as separate duplicate blog posts but keep an en-US base template for the header and footer.

(1 is preferable, 2 would be too much maintenance, and 3 is doable as a second option)